Alliance Bank and Hong Leong Bank Crowned Winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2019 in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA
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October 3, 2019
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the 2019 Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards for Malaysia. Alliance Bank Malaysia Berhad and Hong Leong Bank Berhad (“HLB”) were recognized at the Red Hat Forum Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on Oct. 1, 2019, for their outstanding and innovative usage of Red Hat solutions.

Congratulations to this year’s winners; we hope that they will serve as an inspiration and catalyst to other businesses in Asia Pacific to achieve the same feat and thrive in the digital age.

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With the theme of “Expand Your Possibilities”, the Red Hat Forum APAC 2019 aims to inspire organizations to think beyond their normal day-to-day and challenges they face, and explore ways open source can help generate impactful innovations. One way of doing so is by honoring organizations that have demonstrated creative thinking, determined problem-solving and transformative uses of Red Hat technology through the 2019 Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards.

The winners were selected based on the impact of their Red Hat deployments on their business, industry and the community. They showcased how open source tools and culture were key to achieving efficiency, productivity, and agility – all of which can enable continuous innovation and help them create a flexible foundation that can meet an organization’s needs today and well into the future.

Category: Digital Transformation, Agile Integration

Winner: Alliance Bank Malaysia Berhad (Alliance Bank)

As part of its digital transformation, Alliance Bank deployed the agile Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to help expedite the roll-out of its Branch-in-Tablet initiative to cut the projected timeline from 18 months, to as little as 4 months for the first version of the bank account opening process working prototype. This solution enables the bank’s customers to open a banking account and activate their debit card, Internet, and mobile banking services in as little as 15 minutes. Today, all Alliance Bank branches nationwide are equipped with this efficient tablet solution.

Alliance Bank’s Branch-in-a-Tablet initiative will soon be extended to include other banking products and solutions. The meaningful collaboration with Red Hat helps Alliance Bank fulfil its brand promise to its customers: delivering fast, simple, and responsive solutions that are aligned to their needs.

Categories: Digital transformation, IT Optimization

Winner: Hong Leong Bank Berhad (HLB)

HLB is one of Malaysia’s leading financial services institutions providing regional services of wide ranging and innovative financial solutions to countries which include Singapore, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Vietnam and China. These services are delivered through traditional means and comprehensive digital channels – online and mobile banking, as well as a digital branch concept designed to provide complete customer satisfaction with a simple, efficient and seamless experience aided by technology.

With the rapidly-changing financial landscape, coupled with fast-paced technological changes, staying attuned to customers’ expectations and aspirations are key to HLB’s ongoing efforts to develop capabilities, banking products and services that are centred on clients’ needs.

To this end, HLB deployed Red Hat solutions to enhance its application development capabilities while increasing security capabilities and maintaining its existing IT investments and control of its assets. With Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and its ability to enable an automated container management process that supports provisioning, deployment, and scaling of containers across multiple hosts/nodes, as well as automatic health checks to enable high availability in expected workloads, the bank can take an innovative approach in developing new services and releasing them to the market at a faster rate.

Red Hat OpenShift also offers an open source architecture that enables applications to run across physical, virtual, public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. This has enabled the bank to adopt an agile and human-centric design methodology that helped them to considerably enhance customer experience through continual improvements and adjustments to the UI/UX. The open source architecture also enabled it to integrate its offerings with WeChat Pay, enabling WeChat users to more easily make payments when visiting Malaysia. Collectively, based on its estimates, the new capabilities helped HLB reduce in-house app development and go-to-market time by 40 to 60%, depending on complexity, and lower the cost to market by 40 to 60%.

The Digital Transformation category recognizes organizations that have successfully addressed IT challenges and delivered business value to effectively compete as a digital enterprise. Meanwhile, the IT Optimization category honors companies that showcase the most outstanding transition from legacy IT to becoming a self-service leader and business partner in the digital world. As for the Agile Integration category, it showcases the project that best represents the value of agile integration.

Winners will be recognized at each event in the 10-stop Red Hat Forum APAC event series. Each event will feature a maximum of two winning projects, with both enterprise and government organizations encouraged to participate.

Supporting Quotes

Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager, APAC, Red Hat

“Open source has the power to not only improve IT systems but also transform how we interact and solve problems collectively. It is heartening to see so many organizations using open source to gain exceptional transformation capabilities. Congratulations to this year’s winners; we hope that they will serve as an inspiration and catalyst to other businesses in Asia Pacific to achieve the same feat and thrive in the digital age.”

Chong Lee Chen, head of Lifestyle Banking, Alliance Bank Malaysia Berhad

“Banking clients lead a busy lifestyle and are always on the move. We need to ensure that we continue to meet their needs at their pace, and deliver great customer experience using a platform that they are familiar with. This is why we have partnered with Red Hat: to build an open architecture that allows us to adopt an agile approach for software development. By doing so, we are able to build customer-centric products that are not yet available in the market, improve our service delivery, and improve our time-to-market roll-out. This has empowered us to scale and continue to build for the future, today.”

William John Streitberg, Chief Information and Technology Officer, HLB

“HLB’s journey to digitize began not with the technology, but a cultural shift driven by digital-first values and guiding principles. By deploying Red Hat’s solutions which are open yet enterprise-grade, we have managed to attain rapid development capabilities and maintain the journey of ‘fail fast, fail cheaply, quick to market, and build your own’. This in turn helped to lower our capital expenditure by at least 40% over traditional bought and deployed solutions, and enabled us to deliver more custom tailored digital services to our internal and external stakeholders – which are either developed in-house or through collaboration with third-parties and can help improve our customers’ lives – at a sustainable cost.”

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